The SIAM Health Assessment was created by almost 30 subject matter experts, from different location, different time zones, speaking different languages and all having different opinions and backgrounds.
Here, Matthew Burrows give a better understanding on how the people team made sure that all the key people-related elements were covered by the SIAM Health Assessment.
And we want to say a huge thanks to Matthew for sharing this blog with us!
What is SIAM?
Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a management methodology particularly relevant to situations where services are sourced from a number of service providers. This can include internal and external teams or organizations, who need to work together to ensure an integrated approach – ultimately to ensure that the customers or users get what they need, but also that each of the parties know their roles and responsibilities, and can deliver.
The Foundation Body of Knowledge (BoK) has been available for a few years now, and was most recently updated in 2020. There is also a Professional BoK, which expands on the content, giving additional guidance.
As with many bodies of knowledge, frameworks, methodologies, and best practices, the SIAM BoKs include a number of different ‘practices’, helping people and organizations to apply the ideas and methods – putting into practice rather than just theory!
The SIAM practices are:
- People
- Process
- Measurement
- Technology
People are REALLY important
Whilst my experience is across all of these practices, my core focus is around people, and their skills and competencies – particularly using SFIA, the Skills Framework for the Information Age. Let’s face it, no matter how clever we are with technology, we need people with the right knowledge, skills, competencies and experience, to make things work!
With the growing dependency on technology in almost all industries, it’s no surprise that people with the required skills and competencies are in high demand, and many organizations are experiencing skills shortages. This has pushed the people element higher up the priority list for many, and in the technology world we find that professionals sometimes find it more comfortable dealing with the actual technology itself rather than the people. However, it’s impossible to ignore or delay addressing this aspect, as it’s become critical to success – doing nothing just results in failure to deliver services, and to retain the skills and competencies needed to make it all work.
The ‘People’ practice
The People practice in SIAM covers a number of aspects related to managing cross-functional teams, including structural elements such as boards, process forums and working groups.
A cross-functional team is just another way of describing a group of people with different expertise, often from different departments or organizations, needing to work together to achieve a common goal. The challenges that have to be addressed include conflicting objectives, organizational strategies, working practices, sharing knowledge and automation. The People practice section of the BoKs give guidance on dealing with roles and responsibilities, goals and objectives, knowledge, data and information, communication, and toolset integration.
Where am I?
One of the key first steps is to assess where you are now, then decide where you need to go next, and set about the process of planning the next stage of your journey. It is a little like using a satellite navigation system – the system needs to know your current location and your next planned destination, or else any suggested route is going to be wrong and useless!
Recently I’ve been involved in the initiative to create an assessment which allows organizations to work out their current state of health for each of the SIAM practices, and guide them to where they need or want to be. With my particular focus in mind, I was asked to form a team with a couple of lovely and experienced experts, Helen Morris and Liz Gallacher, to focus on the People practice part of the SIAM Health Assessment. This forms an integrated element of the assessment covering all SIAM practices.
Common issues
The people section of the assessment works with the other areas to help organizations recognise the achievements they have made, and to position these on a scale, and thereby recognise and address some of the common issues that we tend to see in SIAM environments – here are a few examples:
- Lack of a ‘one-team’ culture, supporting collaboration and improvement
- Conflicting attitudes and behaviours
- Structural elements (boards, forums and working groups) not in place, or ineffective
- Insufficient communication or capability to manage change
- Disjointed working practices impacting cross-functional collaboration
- Unclear roles and responsibilities
- No clear picture of the skills and competencies
All of the above represent risks which could critically undermine the ability to deliver products and services and achieve organizational objectives – potentially leading to catastrophic collapse!
Authoring the section – the process
As the ‘people’ team, we wanted to make sure that all the key people-related elements were covered by the assessment, and that we had identified the most common issues which prevent organisations from achieving a fully optimised and effective SIAM model. As well as online group calls, this included working with the authoring teams from the other practices, as none of the elements exist or operate in complete isolation. The collaboration across authoring teams was vitally important, not just to achieve consistency and to benefit from their experience to ensure we hadn’t missed any elements, but also to discuss the interfaces and overlaps, and to agree which team would deal with each aspect.
A few final words…
Ignoring the people aspects in your SIAM journey is not an option, you need to stop and review where you are and make any required adjustments to the route plan. Those organizations who don’t address the people issues, will find that their most talented resources will leave for a better opportunity elsewhere. In a SIAM environment, your critical resources are a mix of internal and external capabilities – so you need to work together to address issues, as there is no merit in standing on the deck of the sinking ship, facing certain drowning, and taking comfort in knowing you are pointing the finger of blame in the right direction!
In SIAM we succeed as an integrated team, working through the challenges mentioned above, and supporting each other to reach agreed common objectives and outcomes. The SIAM Health Assessment gives you the ability to do this quickly and provides guidance for the planning of your next steps.
The ‘People’ people
About the Author
Matthew Burrows is a past President of the Institute of Service Management, contributor to service management and project management standards and publications, member of the SFIA Council and the Global Design Authority for SFIA (the Skills Framework for the Information Age). An internationally recognised thought leader, SFIA Accredited Consultant and Trainer, Matthew works with companies and governments to improve Digital Skills Management maturity, and how to attract, develop and retain Digital, ICT, Cybersecurity and other technology-focussed professionals.
About the other team members:
Helen Morris has 35 years in IT and has specialised in all areas of service management throughout her career. Her experience in SIAM has been as a consultant supporting and preparing organisations to adopt an integrated approach to their services across complex ecosystems. She has been part of the Scopism SIAM team since the writing of the Bodies of Knowledge and joined the assessment team to encourage organisations to recognise the importance of people management in a SIAM ecosystem.
Liz Gallacher has 42 years in IT and has specialised in all areas of service management for 35 years. Her experience in SIAM has been both as a consultant supporting and preparing organisations working to adopt an integrated approach to service provision across complex multi-provider ecosystems, and as a trainer, delivering SIAM courses to the staff in such organisations. She has been part of the Scopism SIAM team since the writing of the Bodies of Knowledge and was delighted to join the assessment team, as she believes the use of the assessment approach will support and encourage organisations to recognise the importance of people management in a SIAM ecosystem.
